Easter Eggs

I pointed out earlier in the explanation of the domain name that you can click the domain name or logo in the header to explain the fact that the domain matches my name if searched as a regular expression. I also described in the article discussion that there are a couple of other arcitectural components that are not prominently exposed, but which can alter the user experience. These are some that are provided by URL arguments:

I described the "offset=X" argument in the the Table of Contents and Pagiation sections as the mechanism used to determine where to start rendering. You can select any section you want and it's mostly going to work, correct something out of bounds or print an error.

A similar feature that you wouldn't stumble accross accidentally is the "items=X" argument. This will display an alternate quantity of sections from that offset. Using '*' will show everything.

Articles also necessarily have a "topic=X" argument which tells the system which article directory to grab content from. Because only articles with a meta.php file will get loaded into the article lists, it is actually possible to find "unpublished" or "hidden" articles if you know their topic identifier. An example of this is the "About Me" article that is linked from the home page, but not otherwise listed.

There is also a "debug=1" option that is currently understood, but has little utility. It is required for some error messages that I use during development, but otherwise any possibel errors that I have written debugging for should pretty much be wiped out by the time it gets to production. There are also error that don't require the debug argument. For instance, try to define an offset or items argument that is not an integer and it will yell at you.

If you hit an error page, for example a 404 you get a random fullscreen image from the Horsetheif Canyon, AB gallery. It provides the error and lets you dismiss all of the window-dressing to see just the image (and a little X to get the window-dressing back).

To Be Continued...

The site is relatively stable, so development has slowed but it is still ongoing. Updates are pushed to the site quickly when written, but you can also view the develpment branch of the site by specifying the 'dev' subdomain. Some things I'm thinking about adding are:

More debugging code! Included the output in a block at the bottom or top rather than in-line

Duplicate "items=*" for list pages. Currently this only works for articles (but I don't have enough to hit the page limit yet anyways).

Code to interpret a "lang=" argument. I'm currently working to improve my French and translating the site might help build that skill. My French is still too bad to confidently add that. I also gave a decent effort to learning Esperanto and might translate things to that if I get really bored. This would require a separate "meta.php" and "content.php" file but other than that it would not be terribly difficult to select which file to load, fallback to English if necessary and suggest alternate languages on pages that provide it.

The initial revision of this site was written almost entirely in JavaScript (Proof) including a lot of wizz-bang flashy stuff. I do as much processing as possible server-side and so most of the JS got chopped out, except for this single file and a couple of things in-line). One flashy thing I did kind of like in moderation was weather effects to the home page. Now that there is a dedicated forecast page, I might add those back there.

For "offset=" greater than the number of elements in the array, correct to the total number minus the item count (or 0).

Accept an offset equal to the section heading text. Determine the offset to that heading automatically. This would allow for easier linking to relevant content that will remain accurate if the index of that section changes.

Set variables equal to the current article topic for easier internal linking. This would be easy, but it would also mean going through and updating all of my old hrefs. I'll probably stop being lazy after the heading text link feature gets added.

Redirect non-existent "topic" to either applicable topic list with an error instead of to 404.

Add a "Tag" system for filtering on the list.php pages.

Add tags to articles so that the reader can find "similar" topics.

Add link to the bottom of an article to the list of articles with the same tag.

I've started tweeting occasionally and sometimes the tweets are related to other thoughts. I should add a simple way to embed tweets in articles.